Rorschach was here...

  ... this morning on the tram I saw this blot:

Not only was it literally "mirrored" because of the window like a pattern of a Rorschach test. It also reminded me of a mix between two of them:

Card1 (Source: https://www.rorschach.org/):

for the top part, something like off-standing ears and dots and card 4 (Source: https://www.rorschach.org/):

for the bottom part, what looks like feet or boots.

Write me, what do you see in the blot from the tram.

The sad face

Caution: This entry contains Watchmen spoilers!

In January 2018 a long time and good internet friend of mine (you know who you are) and I came to talk about masks in an online game and consequently also masks more generally. I told her that I have a Scream mask that glows in the dark. (I still owe that friend a picture of that glowing mask. Back then I didn't get a good picture of that, because I keep the mask in the wardrobe in the dark.) I showed her also masks, of which I was thinking of maybe getting version 1 or version 2.They come closest to the moving Rorschach masks given the options available now. The friend wrote to me then that she had just rewatched Rorschach's death. "he looks like one of his masks inkblots on the snow".

I wrote to her under the title "Rorschach mask ink blots" the following text:

Rorschach's mask is not only moving, those blots are linked to his emotions.

This is one of the cards the psychiatrist shows him when he's caught:

This is the vision or memory he gets from seeing it: his mother (a prostitute) kissing the client. The boy sees them, worries about his mother and speaks to her, which makes the client walk away without paying the mother and she slaps her son:

We never see the full body image of them, like we do on the card, but it should be close enough to get the connection.

Rorschach's obviously false answer to what he sees: “Some nice flowers.“

This is the last image that shows on his mask shortly before his death and before he takes it off:

This is what's left of him, after Doctor Manhattan killed him:

If anything, this is his “sad“ face. It just has to be. Of course it's a sad moment in his childhood, but the image it makes on his face makes sense after we see that memory, at least it makes sense to me. He sees them close and kissing and later gets slapped. That is sad for a boy. And later he knows that Doctor Manhattan will kill him. He has to. They both know it. Another sad moment in Rorschach's life. The remains then form the only shape that makes sense.

There are other ink blots both in the book and movie that are related to certain emotions. But the sad face is the most obvious one of them all and gets repeated several times, as you can see. It's fairly obvious once you pay attention. Most people don't notice.

Check ebay for “Rorschach t-shirt” there are some with that very image for sale, too.

At that time I referred to the movie mostly. In the book there are other situations as well, in which more similar shadows are cast from different people and the Knot Tops spray their tag on walls, which is a very similar figure and on watchmen.fandom.com and whitneyblogs.weebly.com is called "The Hiroshima Lovers" following a comment the psychiatrist makes who evaluates Rorschach.

In memory of Walter Joseph Kovacs (March, 21 1940 - November, 2 1985)

The genius of masks

Halloween. The time for costumes and disguises. One of the few days in the year where the are accepted and worn deliberately and openly also in public more then otherwise. Time for me to write a post on masks, a kind of disguise of the face.

I'm mostly unaware of Asian cultures and also movies. It's not a particular interest of mine to watch Asian movies or dealing with Asian cultures, at least not in detail. A friend of mine that I only know via E-Mail contact so far, wrote to me a while ago that the expressionless masks of the Japanese No Theatre are fascinating to him.

Two days ago I watched the two part movie “It” (from 1990). No wonder that people are afraid of clowns after such a movie. Clowns made up or with mask scare a lot of people. Personally I don't quite understand that. There are scary masks and especially clown masks. Add to that the aggressive behaviour of mask wearing people from last year, I can understand the fear of people like them, but not the general fear of clowns as such. I don't mean this as a criticism. I would very much like to understand what scares people so much about clowns. Maybe there are readers that are afraid of clowns and could explain it. Feel free to leave me a comment!

Masks of criminals are meant to conceal the true identity for them to be unknown and therefore free from punishment. Superheroes on the other hand use masks to hide their own identity for criminals that may otherwise hurt or even kill them more easily without their costume and corresponding weapons. But the lives of the people the superheroes love is also protected by the mask of the hero. Because it could be a leverage for the criminal to kidnap important people and threaten their life to force the superhero to do certain things, as can be seen for example in “The Dark Knight” after the Joker learns that Batman/Bruce Wayne cares a lot about Rachel Dawes and the Joker gives the order to kidnap her.

A mask of a particular kind is worn by the anti-hero Rorschach from “Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Over the course of the story Rorschach is caught and described by the psychiatrist who questions him as “fascinatingly ugly”. The name Rorschach originates from the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach who invented a test named “Rorschach test”, which are ink blots images that the person has to interpret and say what they see in them. The blots are a symmetrical and mostly black. There are also some with more colours. Rorschach from Watchmen worked with clothes as a young man and during that time he gets a special cloth that is white with black, moving and continuously changing blots. Originally he makes a dress from that for a customer, but she eventually disregards it as ugly. Later he uses that cloth to make himself a mask from it with symmetrical black blots that keep changing. Rorschach calls this mask his “face”. After he is ambushed and caught by the police, the mask gets ripped off and he screams, “No! My face! Give it back!” Regardless of Rorschach's personal attitude towards his mask, the description of “my face” for is (actual) mask seems fitting though. A face is usually moving and changes in relation to emotions. The psychiatrist notes however that Rorschach's face is expressionless and finds it difficult to tell what really goes on in him emotionally. Regardless of Rorschach's own attitude towards his (actual) mask, it therefore seems actually fitting when he calls it his "face". His (actual) mask is moving and his (actual) face is expressionless like other masks usually are. It's not necessarily noticed by the reader or viewer of the movie, but the blots on Rorschach's “face” are not only moving, but are in fact linked to his emotions and show identical blot patterns at different times when the same or similar emotions can be assumed!

I also want to mention the post “The Hidden Genius of RORSCHACH's Mask! (Watchmen)“ by Scott Niswander from NerdSync. Among other things he points out in his post that the moment and timing of unmasking is often a bit strange choice. Often the masked person is unconscious or at least bound or otherwise hindered to resist and their identity unknown. The unmasking therefore is a sort of humiliation, because the identity is then revealed at least for the person taking off the mask of the one wearing it. The interesting thing about this is that with this there is a possibility to completely eliminate the masked person, meaning to kill them. But the unmasking and with this revelation of the secret of who is behind the mask, seems a stronger urge for the person that is with the masked person at that moment. Scott Niswander mentions a scene from “Spider-Man 2” and “The Dark Knight” for this.

In regards to unmasking or taking off masks let's one more time refer to Watchmen. Rorschach's true identity (or in his case probably better: identity without “his face”) is revealed to the reader and other people in the story with the aforementioned arrest. He does have “his face” back on for the final fight though. Normally every masked person would resist even at the threat that his masked may be taken away. Understandably so, because the secret identity up until that moment is at risk and also the possible security of beloved persons, as mentioned above. Rorschach, too, resists and screams for his face during his arrest. At the end of Watchmen however he himself takes off his face, his mask and faces his final enemy this way.

In 2012 a series of books came out that showed individual Watchmen characters before the events of Watchmen. Accordingly the series is called “Before Watchmen”. Of course there is also a story about Rorschach by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo. Then and now the story itself doesn't seem to appeal to many people. Like with all stories, I think, this is a matter of personal taste and different people have different tastes. Regarding unmasking there is however one interesting moment in “Before Watchmen: Rorschach”, too. Over the course of the story he gets beat up by a group of bad people and several of the henchmen eventually keep him in check. One of the henchmen wants to take off Rorschach's mask, to see what the fearful Rorschach looks like without the mask. But his boss calls him back and is noticeably disappointed by the fairly short man (described in Watchmen with a height of 168 cm/5' 6 '') to have him caught and defenceless that easily, “Rorschach. Huh. For some reason, I thought... Dude, you don't measure up to your myth. I mean, what the hell? I cocked up this elaborate scheme just to take you down? What was I thinking? Big bad Rorschach. Well, bad anyway Frankly, I'm disappointed in myself. That I stooped to your level. No, no, lucky Pierre. You know what's under that mask? Nothing that matters. In this case, the mask makes the corpse.” After they beat him up some more and seemingly leave him there to die, he adds, “And the front page.“ In another moment of that story one of the bad guys gets his hands on Rorschach's mask and for a moment he can take on Rorschach's identity, because if nobody knows who is behind the mask, a lot of people could be underneath it. Hurm...

Sarah's journal August, 16 2017

Pigeon carcass on pavement this morning.

When Rorschach writes something similar, there is something poetic about it, although in a very dark way. At the very least reading it or hearing it spoken in the movie. But there is nothing at all poetic in reality.

Haven't eaten or drunk anything for the last 12 hours. Eating wasn't the problem. Even though after this time I did get a little bit hungry after all. What really annoyed me was not being allowed to drink because of the blood sampling. Because it was for an allergy test, I'm not even sure I really had to be sober at all this morning. The woman asked me, if it was for the allergy test. I told her yes and asked her, if there's a difference to other blood samplings. Of course, I thought immediately, stupid question. She confirmed to me then that other data would be checked.

Thought for a moment of going back home and writing to the city about the pigeon. Also thought of taking the pigeon and bringing it to the park like on New Year's Eve with the blackbird. Drove straight into the city in the end. Sometimes others don't matter, it seems. The pigeon was dead anyway and nothing that could have helped it. First got a bit of money, then to the bakery. Two Franzbroetchen (puffy pasty with cinnamon) and a hot chocolate. The bakery is in a shopping mall with lots of shops. At about 8:30 when I arrived the exit I wanted to take was still closed. A man who wanted to take that exit before me informed me that it was closed. So I took another way out and passed a contruction area. People already working there. With a noise volume that I turned off my mp3-player until I was half way down the escalators. I looked at the time scale of the mp3-player: 1 minute and 07 seconds. I hadn't heard a single note from “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed although I had the volume full up. So much for the sound of silence, I though on the escalators.

On the middle floor a young woman was in front of me with a jacket that had in all capital letters “DON'T TALK TO ME” on her back. I resisted the temptation to tell her “I'm sorry”. She didn't seem aggressive in any way and was friendly enough to stay on that middle floor to have a smoke, unlike so many other people who go down to the smoking free area to smoke there. Not my style to start a talk with strangers.

Rorschach's Journal: October 12, 1985:

Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. The city is afraid of me. I have seen it's true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, “Save us!” and I'll whisper... “No.“

Cherries

One of our assistant doctors has a cherry tree (actually his father) and he already came the past days with cherries. I told him I'd take a larger amount from him to make jam from it. Of course he'll get a jar, too.

Today he brought me a basket full. I weighed it at home. Basket and cherries: 10.1 kg (22.3 stone).

A very dear colleague helped me getting the basket to the park deck and called a cab from the main entrance to me. It was easiest that way, especially since it's been raining on and off today. A few steps from the cab to my apartment weren't that difficult.

I took a couple of hand full and put them in the kitchen sink, added water and washed them. Then taking off the stems. Of course the stones had to go, too. I don't have any tool to do that and I used the easiest thing to do it in the end: my fingers. Before I really got started, I had the idea to change my grey t-shirt for an older orange one. Good idea. Before I placed everything in a meaningful way, the floor was the first to get some drips, followed by the wall, my t-shirt and my fingers, of course.

I wondered, if larger amounts of blood than just a simple cut would stain that much, too. I discarded the thought of asking one of our doctors though when it occurred to me that they are using gloves during surgeries.

Question: Why do doctors wear gloves during surgery?

Answer: So they don't leave fingerprints.

Actually I thought about Rorschach from Watchmen while taking the stones out. The Comedian gets killed. He's got a badge with a yellow smiley. The smiley gets a distinctive blood stain during the killing. The smiley, changed that way, is one of the most famous signatures for both the book and the movie. Although the smiley from the movie is stained a bit different from the book. Rorschach finds the smiley and goes to his colleague (may we say friend?) Daniel Dreiberg with it. Daniel is not at home, so Rorschach effectively just breaks into the home and also eats a can of baked beans. When Daniel arrives, Rorschach shows him the smiley, which leads to the following dialogue:

Rorschach: Daniel, look at this.

Daniel Dreiberg: Is this bean juice?

Rorschach: Human bean juice. Badge belonged to the Comedian. Blood, too. He's dead.